when i was a kid, i was a magnet for weird shit. the thing i remember the clearest is hearing voices. it easily could have been me hallucinating, but i was so young that i can't remember, and there wasn't really any reason for me to be hallucinating the same thing every night in the same way. but anyway.
the thing i remember clearest was being around 4-5 years old and hearing my cousin, who was a little girl, call for me from outside. she would yell my name and then when i got to the front door of my house, i would unlock it and open it to look outside. it was pitch black obviously and i couldn't see anything. i would yell back for her to come inside because it was dark and we needed to go to bed. but she'd only ever urge me to come outside and play with her. she never responded directly to me, to my memory.
but these are all very fragmented, brief memories. i do know that i walked to the bottom of the stoop in front of the door one time, but i didn't go any farther. i wasn't scared, i just didn't want to get lost in the dark.
my mom told me later, when i was a teenager, that i'd been doing it every day for over a week. i'd wake up, unlock the door, then go back to sleep. she got really freaked out because she couldn't understand how the door kept getting unlocked. so she asked us, me and my brothers, if we were unlocking the door. and i said that i was because my cousin was outside and wanted me to play with her. my mom told me to never ever go outside again at night and got a deadbolt put on the door.
other than that, my encounters with the paranormal have been brief and much harder to explain away. when i was a kid, there was something that took great delight in tormenting me by rattling objects to scare me. there was a horrible dark energy in the corner of my room that felt angry and hateful. it was so bad, i slept in the living room on the floor for months because i couldn't stand to be alone in my room.
as i got older, these feelings dissipated. i never wanted to be able to feel the presence of ghosts and i think my willful wishing to be left alone was what contributed to the eventual neutralizing of the atmosphere around me.